Amazing Coincidences

It was written

• Mark Twain was born on the day of the appearance of Halley's Comet in 1835, and died on the day of its next appearance in 1910. He himself predicted this in 1909, when he said: "I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it."


• Oregon's Columbian newspaper announced the winning Pick 4 lottery numbers for June 28, 2000 in advance. The newspaper had intended to print the previous set of winning numbers but erroneously printed those for the state of Virginia, namely 6-8-5-5. In the next Oregon lottery, those same numbers were drawn.


• In 1979, the German magazine - Das Besteran - ran a writing competition. Readers sent in unusual stories, but they had to be based on true incidents. The winner, Walter Kellner of Munich, had his story published . He wrote about a time when he was flying a Cessna 421 between Sardinia and Sicily. He encountered engine trouble at sea, landed in the water, spent some time in an emergency dinghy and was then rescued. This story was spotted by an Austrian, also named Walter Kellner, who said that the German Kellner had plagiarized the story. The Austrian Kellner said that he had flown a Cessna 421 over the same sea, experienced engine trouble and was forced to land in Sardinia. It was essentially the same story, with a slightly different ending. The magazine checked both stories, and both turned out to be true, even though they were nearly identical.


• Morgan Robertson's 1898 novella Futility had many parallels with the RMS Titanic disaster; the book concerned a fictional state-of-the-art ocean liner called Titan, which (like the Titanic) eventually collides with an iceberg on a calm April night whilst en route to New York, with many dying because of the lack of lifeboats. Various other details in the book coincide with the Titanic disaster.
Later, she wrote a book, Beyond the Spectrum, that described a future war fought with aircraft that carried "sun bombs". Incredibly powerful, one bomb could destroy a city, erupting in a flash of light that blinds all who look at it. The war begins in December, started by the Japanese with a sneak attack on Hawaii.



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Doctor Who - Tooth and Claw

The second episode of the new Doctor Who, Tooth and Claw has just finished and I gotta say...

Now THAT was more like it.

The left last week's average episode standing. Simply brilliant. From the sinister Shaolin monks, Queen Victoria's balls of brass, some top notch CGI graphics, horror, violence, thrills, humor and historical references, this baby was a good one.

From the moment it kicked off bith a pitch battle with warrior monks, to the tunes of Ian Dury's Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick and the usual TARDIS confusion of ending up in 1879 in the wilds of Scotland, instead of an Ian Dury and the Blockheads concert in 1979, this was going to be a good one. As soon as Queen Victoria appeared on the scene, then the coolness factor went up to eleven. What followed was a gothic horror story that grew steadily darker throughout as the seventh assassination attempt on Victoria turned into something a lot more otherworldly. Like The Unquiet Dead from Series One, this took a classic horror idea - werewolves - and turned it on its head.

The humor was kept to a minimum, mostly comments about Rose being improperly dressed for the time period and the Doctor's here one minute, gone the next Scottish accent (doubly an in joke since David Tennant is from Paisley). Mostly this was a rollocking good horror mystery. In parts it managed to be genuinely chilling and the violence level will probably lead to a few complaints to the BBC as the werewolf started to inflict some major damage on those trapped in a gothic house in the remote Scottish highlands.

Pauline Collins was both occasionally charismatic, but more often ruthless and snarky as Victoria, portraying her as a stone faced Emperess with more grit than any of the male leads. There was a sympathetic performance from Derek Riddell as the Lord whose house becomes a trap for Victoria. The real star of the episode, was the werewolf itself that was impeccibly CGIed for a TV series and will have genuinely terrified younger viewers. A great transformation sequence and possibly the best lookign werewolf I've ever seen onscreen.

They made sure to play up to a few cliches of the genre, with wolfsbane and the full moon all playing their part in the climax to the story. For added measure, they even threw in the Koh-In-Nor, (the Mountain of Light), the supposedly cursed jewel that is the world's largest diamond and managed to tie everything together in a great climax.

They even managed to set up Torchwood, the Doctor Who spin-off series that already got referenced in the Christmas episode, and namecheck the second Doctor's companion Jamie McCrimmon as well as tying into Bad Wolf.

Bloody brilliant and possibly the best episode of the new Who so far.